Stephen Fry on Unbelief

A friend has sent me a link to this talk by Stephen Fry, “The Importance of Unbelief,” as the justification for their own atheism/humanism—and asked for a response.

Fry's main point, or at least the hook for the talk, is that you should not believe in an afterlife, because if you do, you will not make the most of this life. This is not really an argument against the existence of the afterlife: just because a thing is inconvenient, you cannot will it out of existence. But even on its own terms, this seems to me to be about the opposite of the truth. In either case, afterlife or no afterlife, you only have a predictably finite time in this life. If you believe in an afterlife, however, everything you do here matters; you are obliged to make the most of your time. If you do not, nothing you do now matters. You might as well just watch some more TV. You go for whatever seems most comfortable at the moment; which is generally making a living and indolence.

May I speak of myself? Believing in the afterlife, I have made rather a greater effort than most of my contemporaries to educate myself, to experience the best in art, and to see the world. But I can't hold a candle to, say, St. Francis Xavier or any of the other early Jesuits. It was the Church that invented the schools and universities, that inspired and supported all the great art, even that inspired the idea of travel (see pilgrimage), right up until quite modern times.

Fry then dismisses the argument for the existence of God from design—i.e., from the beauty of nature. But here he is confusing different things: he takes beauty to be the same as pleasantness and prettiness. There is awful death in nature? There is awful death in Hamlet, too, or Romeo and Juliet, or Oedipus Rex. Does that mean they are bad plays? Does that mean they are not beautiful?

Nature is beautiful in the true sense—true beauty is not prettiness, but must include the sublime.

Fry is left arguing that nature is morally unsatisfactory—a separate argument, and he must still account for why, if without a designing intelligence, it is beautiful. He does not; he cannot.

So we turn to the “argument from evil.” Is nature immoral? No, not in detail. Because animals, plants, viruses and volcanoes are not morally conscious beings, they cannot be acting immorally.

Does nature involve suffering? No doubt. Is suffering evil? Who knows?

What he means, then, presumably, is that nature overall seems to act unjustly. That does appear to be so—why is one person born beautiful while the next is born ugly? Why does one person die in infancy, while another lives to be eighty? This is the question famously raised by the Bible in the Book of Ecclesiastes. The world is unjust. On this, we all agree.

But then, this becomes an argument for the existence of God. If we have this unshakeable conviction that there ought to be justice, must be justice, despite all the evidence of the world as it is, where can this conviction come from? Obviously not from experience. Ergo, it must have been put there by God, Ergo, it is a sign of God's own true nature and his plan. Ergo, there will be justice. Ergo, there must be an afterlife.

Fry's next argument is that science has replaced the need for God. This is the essential premise of the new pseudo-religion of Scientism, which has done a great deal of harm in the modern world; not least to science. To begin with, science is a tool; science makes no claims to truth in the philosophical sense. If this were not enough, science can also tell us nothing about morality, meaning, or subjective experience. This last is important, because in the end, all that we really have is subjective experience. Everything else exists only theoretically.

Fry then insists that we have responsibility for “creating our own ethical and moral frameworks.” Can you see the problem here? If we have free choice over what is right or wrong, then we have the right to decide for ourselves that, for us, it is okay to torture and kill small children, for example. It is just our free moral choice, right? Then too, we have no business at all complaining about a Hitler or a Nazi Germany, do we? Killing Jews and such was just their free moral choice. Much less about a Church “imposing its morals on us.” That's just their own moral choice, isn't it?

Surely you, like me, are instantly repelled by this proposed state of affairs. No, we know in our hearts that it is wrong to torture and kill small children, right? Okay, let's leave aside abortion for now... In other words, we do not create our own ethical and moral frameworks. Morality and ethics are absolutes; we cannot legitimately violate them on our own say-so or choice. If we do, we are acting immorally. Reject this premise, and morality itself has no meaning.

But if morality and ethics are absolutes, regardless of what this or that person, or even all people put together, might think about it, where do they come from? The answer really has to be that they are from God, and an expression of his essential nature. Ergo, God is good. They also reveal his plan: his plan is for the moral good.

Fry contrasts his view that morality is something we decide on for ourselves with the idea that it comes from “words put down in a book.” This is the fallacy of the false alternative. Nobody I know believes that morality itself comes from the Bible, or any other book. Christians believe that the sense of right and wrong is inborn. It is called conscience.